Last Saturday, I got coffee outside with a friend whom I’d barely seen all pandemic. Straight after bumping elbows, he proudly took out his phone to show me his latest medical tests: his bad cholesterol had plummeted because he had stopped eating out. He was happy not socialising. Invited to two illegal dinner parties the previous night, he had told each host that he couldn’t come because he was going to the other gathering. He then sat at home and watched Netflix. We enjoyed seeing each other, but in less than an hour we were both done, made our excuses and each retreated home to blessed solitude.
The focus during the pandemic has rightly been on people who have suffered: the dead, the bereaved, the lonely, the depressed, the newly unemployed, the impoverished, women beaten by partners, parents stuck in endless home school and the young watching their youth tick away unused. But there’s a guilty truth that rarely dares speak its name: many of us became happier during the pandemic. Now, as vaccines promise an eventual return to normal life, we aren’t sure we want it.
Ipsos’s annual Global Happiness survey, which polled 20,000 adults in 27 countries last July and August, came up with an intriguing finding: 63 per cent said they were happy, just one percentage point down on 2019. This was around the usual yearly decline: the percentage claiming to be happy fell 14 points globally between 2011 and 2020, with particularly steep drops in Mexico, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Spain and India. Last year’s loss of the public sphere didn’t seem crucial, because the most-cited sources of happiness were private ones: “my health/physical wellbeing”, “my relationship with my partner/spouse” and “my children”.